Search on after Malaysia Airlines flight vanishes

[Hermit]

The search widens even more.

[FBM]

I think this means that its wave function hasn't collapsed - since it hasn't been observed - and therefore due to something or other having to do with Feynman or Schrödinger or perhaps Planck, the plane is now in every possible state, taking every possible path between where it was last observed and where it might be observed in the future.

[Hermit]

I think this means that its wave function hasn't collapsed - since it hasn't been observed - and therefore due to something or other having to do with Feynman or Schrödinger or perhaps Planck, the plane is now in every possible state, taking every possible path between where it was last observed and where it might be observed in the future.

...or the past. You forgot the past.

Once the conundrum concerning being and nothingness has been resolved, the rest should be easy.

Alternatively, all those so-called experts should take the obvious shortcut: Look in the last place. It's a well known fact that that is where everything is found. Fools.

[FBM]

I think this means that its wave function hasn't collapsed - since it hasn't been observed - and therefore due to something or other having to do with Feynman or Schrödinger or perhaps Planck, the plane is now in every possible state, taking every possible path between where it was last observed and where it might be observed in the future.

...or the past. You forgot the past.

Once the conundrum concerning being and nothingness has been resolved, the rest should be easy.

Alternatively, all those so-called experts should take the obvious shortcut: Look in the last place. It's a well known fact that that is where everything is found. Fools.

I think you've nailed it. I think we ought to start by mass e-mailing everyone for the last 25 years to see if they know where it is. Then we need to contact the searchers and tell them to stop fucking around with this chronological approach and skip to the end.

[Tero]

I've called my house phone from my cell phone. The ringing in the cell is about the same as in the house, maybe the house just one ring late. The "rings" never match, both rings are computer generated and out of sync.

Calling to a cell, mine goes immediately to voice mail if the cell is turned off.

[FBM]

[Tero]

It was on mysterious ringing disappeared cell phones. Earlier in this thread.

I think the ghost rings were due to the tower attempting to connect.

[Tero]

Surely some of the passengers must have been in mobile phone contact at some point? Even if they suspected nothing amiss, there should have been some outgoing text messages during those hours.

Do mobiles work in flight? Or do they need to connect through the plane's transmitter?

The 9-11 flights' phones worked direct to ground. But here there is very little ground.

[JimC]

To Macdoc's earlier post about the difficulty of penetrating a nuclear power plant with a plane. You may well be right about recent Western designs, but I wouldn't be so sure that the same structural integrity applies to Soviet era reactors in southern Russia, or Chinese reactors, both of which could be targets of islamic groups...

Keep those Mig fighters circling, chaps!

[pErvinalia]

I've called my house phone from my cell phone. The ringing in the cell is about the same as in the house, maybe the house just one ring late. The "rings" never match, both rings are computer generated and out of sync.

Calling to a cell, mine goes immediately to voice mail if the cell is turned off.

When I turn my house phone off (i.e. the base unit in a cordless system), it rings endlessly from the perspective of someone trying to call me.

[Drewish]

Surely some of the passengers must have been in mobile phone contact at some point? Even if they suspected nothing amiss, there should have been some outgoing text messages during those hours.

Do mobiles work in flight? Or do they need to connect through the plane's transmitter?

The 9-11 flights' phones worked direct to ground. But here there is very little ground.

But what if they were all in airplane mode??!!!

[Calilasseia]

Item #1:

While that crash test looks impressive, there's a difference in mass between an F-4 and a 777. An F-4, fully laden with fuel and weapons, is 16 tons. A fully laden 777 is 300 tons. Which might affect the outcome.

Item #2:

If someone has tried to steal this 777, they're going to have a lot of fun hiding it. It's the biggest twin-jet airliner in existence. The fuselage length of that particular model is 209 feet. Here's my attempt to render a 777 compared with the Old Trafford football ground, with the aircraft as close to scale with the ground schematic as I can make it:

Hiding something that big while you set it up for a suicide mission is going to require a lot of ingenuity. Given that military observation satellites have 1 metre resolution, such satellites will have no difficulty finding a 777 on the ground. Or, a hangar capable of housing one. In order to have some room for safe manoeuvring, you need a hangar 75 metres square, with a roof height of around 20 metres. To put this in perspective, here's an attempt to show a 777 in scale superimposed over my local branch of Morrisons supermarket:

Boeing 777 Compared With Local Morrisons.jpg (223.39 KiB) Viewed 365 times

If the civilian satellites Google uses to produce Google Maps and Google Earth can spot something this size with this ease, you can bet that a military intelligence satellite will find it even easier.

Quite simply, the places where hangars of this size would be expected to appear, are either civilian airports or military airports, or possibly industrial estates with "big shed" style buildings of the sort that IKEA uses. Remote places in the Stans won't have facilities like this. The only way you could hide a 777 out in some remote location is to build a fucking huge underground hangar, and that sort of engineering project would require the backing of a government. Not something a bunch of terrorists could pull off. Likewise, all that excavator and dumper truck activity removing the material would arouse a lot of suspicions once someone picked it up, something else you couldn't hide from satellites. Then, you'd need a ramp to the entrance (more excavation), which itself would be pretty visible, and you'd have to build all of this within easy reach of something resembling a runway for the airliner to land on. As in 10,000 feet of flat land. The preparatory logistics for this would be enormous, and would take years to run to completion.

Consequently, if there's even a small hint that this sort of operation is being conducted, you can bet satellites have been filming this for years.

Of course, if we're going to head off into James Bond territory, whoever has done this could decide to "hide" the aircraft by ditching it (itself a risky operation requiring a very skilled pilot if the plane isn't to break up when it hits the water), then arranging for the plane to be recovered piecemeal and reassembled elsewhere. This is an even bigger logistical nightmare, because now you're into the business of using submarines. Which is going to be a tad difficult when the navies of 12 different nations are scouring the waters in question. Even if you manage to avoid detection, and get back to the plane to cut it up and ship it inland for a rebuild, there's the little matter of making the bits serviceable after long term immersion in salt water. How many terrorists possess that expertise?

If they're going to go to all that trouble to acquire a 777, it would probably be a lot easier, and a lot cheaper, simply to arrange for some sympathetic Wahhabist Saudi financier to buy a 777, list it as being held by some charter leasing company, and deliver it as a "charter flight". More difficult to track, arouses fewer suspicions, and doesn't result in lots of aircraft and naval vessels looking for their handiwork. At which point, the terrorists can take delivery, with no passengers to worry about, other than other members of their cadre boarding the flight before take off, and then set about fitting it with a surprise package at leisure. Of course, chances are Western intelligence is also looking out for this possibility, and keeping close tabs on people buying airliners, which isn't difficult, given that airliners are expensive bits of kit (around £200 million a pop), and the financial transactions involved would probably ring some alarm bells as well. Usually, bona fide airlines order multiples, and a single purchase would probably be pretty suspicious in itself.

[Clinton Huxley]

It took the intelligence agencies years to find Osama bin Laden, who'd cunningly hidden in his house, so I suppose it ain't beyond the realms of possibility to hide a 777 for a few weeks. Satellites have the resolution to spot it easily, but they have to actually take a photo of the spot, process it, someone has to look at it I bet this ain't as "real time" as the movies depict it.

I'm not saying its likely though.

Maybe there was a Russian on board and Putin annexed it?

[JimC]

It took the intelligence agencies years to find Osama bin Laden, who'd cunningly hidden in his house, so I suppose it ain't beyond the realms of possibility to hide a 777 for a few weeks. Satellites have the resolution to spot it easily, but they have to actually take a photo of the spot, process it, someone has to look at it I bet this ain't as "real time" as the movies depict it.

I'm not saying its likely though.

Maybe there was a Russian on board and Putin annexed it?

Give me many fanatical workers, a giant fishing net, and lots of other materials, and I guarantee the Great Satan would not see our plane with their evil satellites...

[cronus]

There's the processing power and the software to spot planes on these large scale maps. My bet is its been and done and turned up nothing new. Most likely the plane fell into the sea or onto land at a terrifying angle/speed and the impact is what shut the signal off. The splattered remnants would not resemble a plane on a satellite map. The tsunami monitoring system would have picked up a faint aftershock if it had been land at the same time as the signal shut off. Seems likely they've examined this data and this is what is informing their search towards China. Likely any data they've targeted on was natural background tectonics not wreckage. Likely the plane landed in the sea and couldn't imitate a boat on account of speed/angle of entry. Eventually something will turn up on a shoreline and after a few bits are located a area the size of Wales will be searched for a few months until the main crash scene is uncovered. No big deal. They'll be all dead, no conspiracy necessary.